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Daily Tech News 28 November 2021

Top Story

• And nothing of value was lost: The entire Moderation Team for the Rust programming language has resigned. (.clue)
  
  The icing on the cake for this abject wankery (you might not want to eat that cake, by the way) is that the resignation was tendered via a pull request on GitHub. (The New Stack)
  
  Even the (these days) consistently left-leaning Slashdot knows what's up.
  
  For example:

  Who would have had any kind of inkling that a bunch of SJW cancel culture jack-boots would throw a tantrum when they find out that they don't actually run everything, and that people who do actual technical work turn out to be the ones who matter?

  And:

  It is of utmost importance to me that a group of non-developers be put in charge of the brilliant developers creating one of the most popular new languages to ensure that they are never mean in a code review or utilize any banned language within their code base.

  Someone's paying attention:

  Watch some videos about what happened at Evergreen State College a couple years ago and get back to us about who's acting like assholes.

  
  
  
• Speaking of abject wankery, that second site, The New Stack, is filled with it.
  
  Data Fabrics for Engineered Decision Intelligence
  Edge Computing Integrated with Blockchain
  Why Cloud Native Is About Community
  Welcome to the "PRty": The All-Inclusive Pull Request
  
  
  
• Henceforth I shall refer to the filing of worthless pull requests as wanking - jerking off to my American friends - as in: Ted spent the entire afternoon wanking in his cubicle.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Another comparison of Intel's i7 12700K to the Ryzen 5800X and 5900X. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  To cut the story short - though it's worth reading if you want to buy a new computer with a specific purpose in mind:
  
  
• The 12700K is very good, and avoids most of the excesses of the 12900K. For most tasks it's nearly as fast and significantly cheaper
• AMD's chips are much more power-efficient, and it really looks like their multi-threaded performance is constrained more by power limits than the chip's capabilities.
• There's little reason right now to bother with DDR5 at all, which is good because there isn't any.
  
  
• The full list of non-K - mainstream non-overclockable - Alder Lake CPUs has been assembled thanks to multiple leaks by online stores around the world. (WCCFTech)
  
  And if online stores in Bangladesh have the details, everyone does.
  
  Except for the 12700 and the low-power 12700T, none of these have the new Efficiency cores, just the full-size Power cores. Which means that there's really only two new configurations: Four cores / eight threads on the 12100, 12200 (if that exists - I suspect it's a typo), and 12300; and six cores / twelve threads on the 12400, 12500, and 12600.
  
  For the average user even the low-end 12100 should be a very capable CPU.
  
  
  
• Pop psychology has killed the villain. (UnHerd)
  
  Kills and skins puppies just to make a stylin' new coat? That's because she was traumatised by a TV commercial as a child.
  
  Villains in stories are villains for the same reason that 1+1=2 in arithmetic: Because it works. You can construct a system of arithmetic where 1+1=3, but it's pointless to do so because it doesn't relate to reality.
  
  Quite a good examination of trends in entertainment generally, pointing out that competent directors were aware of this danger and warned against it decades ago.
  
  
  
• GitHub went down again. (Hacker News)
  
  As in: Ted was planning to spend the entire afternoon wanking in his cubicle, but GitHub was down so he had to actually do some work.
  
  
  
• We're doomed.
  
  

  I have to go. pic.twitter.com/v7KwA2D2JG

  — foone (@Foone) June 19, 2021

  
  
  
• Smoking a turkey with Prometheus, Home Assistant, and Grafana. (BlockLoop)
  
  And a smoker.
  
  
  
• Python library of the day is Bokeh. (Bokeh.org)
  
  This is a data visualisation library that lets you construct your graphs and charts - and entire interactive dashboards - in Python and display them as a web page, or a component within a web page.
  
  You don't need to do any direct JavaScript nonsense yourself, and it can produce some pretty sophisticated data plots.
  
  
  

In Which the New York Times Almost Wakes Up From Its Nap Video of the Day



I had Viva Frei playing on the second monitor while I ate lunch and skimmed the news for this roundup, so when that video ended and YouTube cued up another I didn't have many hands free to stop it and just let it play.

After I minute I looked over to see which conservative or libertarian-leaning channel I had landed on, and was bemused to find that it was the New York Times.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



There's clearer videos of this one in English, but it sounds better in the original Klingon, so that's what I went with. Well, there's a 2019 performance which I think has one of the original band members, but that doesn't count.

This is one of the first I thought of when I started rounding up 70s songs as a commentary on the world's present economic and sociopolitical woes, and one of the things I immediately thought is that it would make a great mashup with Boney M's Rasputin.

Apparently it doesn't - Moskau has variable tempo, not a lot but enough to wreck the sync with any other song. You can adjust the tempo of one song in a mashup as long as it remains consistent, like this:



But adjusting it from one verse is to the next is not only a whole lot of work, it changes the feel of the song and ruins the mashup.



Disclaimer: Breakfast cereal off the starboard bow.